UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero is a member of the NCAA Tournament selection committee and next year, Guerrero will serve as the committee’s chairman. That means he will be the man answering the tough questions concerning which teams got in and which teams were left out. Guerrero did a Q&A with Daily News staff writer Jill Painter before he left for Indianapolis, where March Madness really began this week. The NCAA Tournament bracket will be announced this afternoon, but the committee’s work began last year.

DN: What’s the week/weekend like for you? Is it more stressful or exciting?

DG: It really is exciting. It’s the culmination of a lot work that began in November, when the season started. Prior to that, as a committee we deliberated last summer to get a read for this year. We watched a lot of games in person. We Tivo’d a number of games and we all stay up late until the wee hours of the morning watching various teams across the country so that when we got in the room Wednesday we all had a real good sense of the landscape of college basketball.

It’s very exciting, no question.

DN: How much sleep are you averaging each night?

DG: I don’t know. I Tivo a minimum of four games every night, for the most part. I would go home and watch those games until pretty late at night. I wouldn’t always watch a full game. I’d find out scores and the outcome of games before I actually watched them. If it was a blowout, I’d see how one team blew out the other team.

If it was close, I’d watch the second half to see how those teams played down the stretch. As we get closer to January and February, some of the potential teams in the mix started to shrink somewhat. They may have played themselves out of consideration. Just about every game has some kind of meaning. One team might not get in, but another team might.

DN: You must have a separate Tivo than the rest of your family members?

DG: I do, indeed.

DN: Will you look at the process differently now that you’ll be the chair next year?

DG: I pay a lot more attention to what (chairman) Mike Slive is doing this year.

The responsibilities for the chairman mean a lot more interviews and speaking on behalf of the committee.

It’s likely I will travel a little more next year to go see games in different parts of the country in person, which is something I didn’t do that much this year. I do travel regionally in the local area. We can catch several conferences in Southern California. Mike, for the most part, hits the road quite bit. It’s likely I would do that as well.

DN: How many hours does it take to do the seedings and the bracket?

DG: The bracket is done in a relatively short period of time. We believe (this morning) we’ll be pretty close to (already) having all the teams seeded. There are a couple of tournaments that end (today), and we may have to tweak the seeding a little bit. Once the seeding is done, you get in the bracket exercise and that’s usually an hour or two. Of those conferences (still playing championship games), the big question is who is in those tournaments and what implications do they have on the brackets? Last year, we had to do several brackets (late) because we were waiting to see how the games ended.

When we got (to Indianapolis) on Wednesday, we had an initial ballot that we complete by Wednesday evening. Those are the teams the committee feels are deserving of an at-large selection regardless of whether they win conference tournaments. We’ve all done our homework before meeting this week. We go into that process and have a good sense of what the initial pool of teams will look like. We won’t be seeded yet; we’ll just select the teams. Then we started to build the rest of the field on Thursday, knowing full well tournaments still are playing and there might be upsets. For the most part, the beginning of the process was on Thursday. You spend most of the time on selection. Once you get into a certain number of teams in, then you start getting into the teams in the pool of consideration that are similar in lot of ways.

DN: What’s the biggest misconception people have about the selection process?

DG: Oddly enough, I believe it’s the bracketing process. Sometimes, people don’t have a good feel about it. I’ve often heard the committee sits down and when they bracket the field, they look for matchups that might be intriguing to fans. There’s nothing further from truth. With the bracketing process, you go along an “S” curve and you fit teams based on seed and region. You really have no context as to who is playing who until the final bracket is conveyed.

It certainly isn’t pre-meditated by any means.

DN: What’s the most important thing you would tell a team to do, beside winning its conference tournament, to help its chances of making the NCAA Tournament field?

DG: Obviously, you want to win basketball games. That’s the absolute.

There’s no question about that. Performing well in your conference is a plus. Every coach’s goal is to win the conference. I believe if you ask many coaches, winning the conference is more important than the conference tournament. That being said, you want to finish the season strong as well. That can make an impression as well. There are certain teams that are on the rise and peaking. The bottom line is the committee looks at the entire body of work – games in November and February and March.

Obviously, it’s important to be consistent during the course of the season.

DN: The committee obviously has to make some tough decisions. Do the decisions linger with you after the process is over?

DG: No. In those meetings, there’s not always unanimity. Of course, you seek to build consensus, but in some cases compromise is reached.

Sometimes, you don’t know who other members of the committee are voting for because everything is done on computer. We submit votes, but the votes are tabulated by the NCAA staff. I don’t know what the person sitting across room from me might be thinking or how they vote. The reality of the process is that everyone collaborates and deliberates on a continual basis the next several days. There’s a tremendous amount of information to look at and evaluate as it relates to each team. Each team has a quantitative and qualitative assessment based on all of us looking at games and talking to coaches and fellow athletic directors. We have a regional advisory committee, too. We certainly don’t lack for information. Every team under consideration gets a fair assessment.

DN: How heated can debates get?

DG: There have been cases where a particular individual will feel very strongly about a particular team and another might not feel as strong. You’ll have a lot of give and take. You talk about things being paper thin in terms of differences of one team over another. In the end, we make the decisions, and we’re proud of the brackets and teams we select. I know there are good teams that don’t make the field. It sometimes causes great disappointment for teams and fans and student athletes. In the end, we always feel good about the field of 65. It’s a great tournament and it invariably turns out great.

DN: In general, do you believe the committee favors schools from the major conferences who might finish fifth or sixth or, in some cases, seventh in their conference over a mid-major program who might have finished second in their respective conferences?

DG: No. The committee is comprised of representatives from all aspects of Division I. Our charge is to pick the best 34 teams (for at-large bids). We look at each team on its own merits, whether the team is from a larger conference or whatever. It’s all flushed out. We talk about every aspect of a team. Certainly we have to compare one team over another. Sometimes, you have situations where a Southern Alabama gets compared over a team from the ACC or something of that nature.

For the most part, we pick teams we feel are the best in the field after the 31 automatic qualifications irrespective of what conference they’re from.

DN: What’s the selection room like? Is it organized or chaotic?

DG: We take up half of the 15th floor in the Westin in Indianapolis.

All the members have their own rooms. There’s a room like a hospitality room where there’s several TVs set up and they’re wired for us to see various tournaments in the same room where we eat. We spend some leisure time there when we’re on a break outside of the room. The room itself is a large rectangular room with a large rectangular table with computers in front of us. We all have our own individual computers. There are three screens in front of us that also bring up data we ask staff to provide for us. If we want to compare two or even three teams, we can look at their records at home and away on the road, records, RPI, strength of schedule and all those kind of things. We ask the staff and they pull them up. We can evaluate any team against another team.

That’s accessible to us at all times. There are 10 people, five on one side and four on another and the chair is sitting at the head of the table. There’s a few NCAA staff members there monitoring the process and providing us with the information.

DN: How much sleep do you get during this process and what do you do in your free time?

DG: From what I’ve seen, the West Coast representatives get less sleep because of the time change, and we’re more inclined to stay up late and watch the West Coast games.

We’re up early at 7 or 7:30, which is getting up at 4:30 our time. We eat breakfast at 7:30 and get started at 8 a.m. We never leave (the hotel). If we want to work out we can.

There’s a security guard at the elevator of our floor, he knows where we are if we’re going together. Typically, we don’t (leave). We could go out if we wanted to, but we stay sequestered in the hotel. You can work out during the week if you need to.

DN: You have to excuse yourself when the committee discusses UCLA. What do you do during that time?

DG: I usually go into the room with the flat screen TVs or go into my room for the most part. Sometimes, it’s five minutes or 10 minutes and other times it’s an hour.

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